Live Event: AQ

[World of Warcraft] Today was my server’s (Mannoroth) day for the gates of AQ (Ahn’Qiraj) to open. Unfortunately, I was on the road today, had to pick up my brother, and forgot that my local time zone is not the same as my server’s time zone, so I missed the opening of AQ by a few minutes. Regardless, I got to run around the area and have a little fun.

It took me a little while to get to Silithus. You have to fly to Tanaris first before you could fly to Silithus and it’s a pretty long flight from Orgrimmar. While flying, I noticed some weird crystal structures with elite enemies surrounding it in the barrens. The elites were low level, so it’s nice to see that Blizzard decided to include the low levels in some way.

Horde got to the gong first. The gong (NOTE: not actual gong) basically opened the gates. I missed this part, unfortunately. By the time I made it there, the gates were already open and people of both factions were running around rampantly. This was my first time in Silithus. Unfortunately I was on my old, yet still decent, computer, but it just wasn’t keeping up to par with the action. It was either that or the server, but other people seemed to be playing just fine, so I’m going to have to attribute a bit to the computer I was on.

When I first arrived the first thing you see are giant Anubis-like figures. These things were 61 elites that would stomp you to death if you weren’t careful. Basically they were raid bosses outside. I cast a few spells on a few of these, one of them ending up pounding me into the earth because I didn’t realize there wasn’t anyone tanking it. Growing bored, I decided to join a raid that was going to kill another boss that had spawned. I forget the exact name, but it was a giant (I’m talking enormous here) beetle. Forget trying to defeat this thing with a PUG raid. This thing would AoE knock-back and throw you a fourth of the map away, which means you basically died. I, unfortunately, got hit by this and thrown into the middle of a bunch of elite enemies. Fun. This guy was unfortunate and died mid-air. Have fun rezzing, buddy! We attempted another boss that spawned, which was basically the same thing, just a different color. The same thing happened.

Of course, Mannoroth being a PvP server, you had PvP going on, and it wasn’t fun and friendly. Alliance decided to use their numbers and camp out the 20 man AQ raid instance entrance. Surprisingly, you didn’t have massive ganking/zerging going on elsewhere. I ran up to the outpost in Silithus to pick up the flight point and to repair my armor (I had been killed several times by MOBs at this point and was low on durability). Running into the outpost you see armies of both Horde and Alliance NPCs all lined up. I passed by a group of these before entering the town. After leaving the town and exiting the same way I came in, the army had doubled in size and now a group of Anubis were attempting to attack the NPCs. I decided to steer clear because it looked like an Alliance raid was forming and they didn’t like straggling Horde to interfere with their fighting, even if I was helping.

I tried to get into a 20 man AQ group, but with my Shaman being level 57, I had no luck when everyone was looking for 60s and there were plenty of 60s to spare. I just wanted to look at the instance anyways, I didn’t really care to run it at the time, but the instance requires you to be in a raid to enter. I found another guy who wanted to do the same thing and we decided to join a group together and change it into a raid, which would allow us to enter. We checked out both the 20 and 40 man raid instances. We couldn’t get very far, but due to him being a hunter and I a shaman, we could use our Eagle Eye/Far Sight abilities to take a peek at what was ahead. I was able to figure out a Far Sight exploit, which allows me infinite range on my Far Sight and I got quite a few screenshots, but nothing too great, especially in the 40 man because, I’m assuming, that you have to kill a boss in order to open up the next portion of the instance.

Overall it was fun to mess around, but unless you were in an organized raid, you probably didn’t get much out of the day. Regardless, it was still cool to see all this action going on.